Vectober 5: Pencil
Still listening to Kobra and the Lotus’ “High Priestess” on repeat. Because it seems to be that kind of day.
This is a straight up photo trace because I didn’t wanna have to think about anything but the materials experiment. I am not entirely happy with the likeness (especially the nose, geeze) but I spent a half hour on it and that’s enough, especially given that this particular tool was drawing a little bit offset from where I expected it to.
This “pencil” is actually a bristle brush, with some effects added:
By applying these effects to the stroke of the path rather than the path, they’re processed after the bristle brush draws a bunch of translucent shapes based on my brush stroke. And this munging up of those shapes produces a halfway-decent procedural pencil stroke. I used it at a few different opacities and sizes but that’s basically it.
This one’s done on a lot fewer layers than normal; there’s a background layer with a few pale blurred shapes to simulate “slightly bent paper”, a layer for the signature, and the usual 5-25% hard/soft light layer with a mezzotinted rectangle for texture. All the “pencil” marks are on a single layer, because I felt it was important to simulate that part of working on paper.
Mostly this reminded me why I never use the bristle brushes. I can either hold my stylus straight up and down, or I can have the “paint” deposited a little below and to the right of where I expect it to go. It might be better if I was on a Surface (I miss the Surface, really wish I could’ve gotten it to actually work 100% with Illustrator) or a Cintiq, but I drew this standing at my desk, with the Intuos flat on it.
and here’s that selfie. Bags under my eyes and all.
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.